Matthew Hart as Toad in Royal Ballet's The Wind in the Willows. Photo:

Suddenly last summer, a telephone call from Deborah Bull at the Royal Opera House. Her colleague Will Tuckett was about to start adapting The Wind in the Willows as a ballet, using music by George Butterworth, and wanted to include an all-speaking, non-dancing narrator. (The idea sprang from a recent production he had mounted of Constant Lambert's Mr Bear Squash-You-All-Flat , in which such a figure appears.) Did I know the book? Was I interested in it? Would I like to write a poem-libretto for the narrator?

Print played a small part in my childhood. Neither of my parents were especially interested in reading, and my brother and I preferred the outdoors to the in: it was a country upbringing. But for some reason, they made an exception of Toad (as they called it, following the example of thousands). Perhaps they felt they had to pass on something they'd enjoyed in their own early days? Perhaps they thought it fitted our rural life? Perhaps (a more complicated perhaps) they were reassured by its animal politics? In any event, it's one of the few books they read aloud to me, my mother taking the more lyrical bits, my father dealing with the flights and fights.

I told Bull I'd look at it again, meet Tuckett and see what he had in mind, then let her know. It didn't take long. Tuckett's ideas all sounded terrific - suggestive but not sentimental - and the book intrigued me. It was so unlike the thing I remembered: the prose generally much more gluey, and the structure wonkier - but the psychology more interesting. Why, for instance, is there no one particular baddie for us to condemn (or identify with)? What is a contemporary to make of the pantheism, especially the chapter called "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"? Why does it take Toad so long to make his mark on the story? Why, when he does appear, is he such a charmless hero, a kind of proto-Jeffrey Archer? And how can we not shrink from the reactionary crudity of his battle with the working-class stoats and weasels, not to mention the book's various other forms of stereotyping, prejudice, etc?

Given this, it wasn't surprising to discover that The Wind in the Willows got poor notices when it first appeared (in 1908). Child-readers and their parents, however, were not put off, and within a few years it was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. This isn't surprising either, since a lot of the most successful children's books are precisely as consoling as they are challenging (the Potter series is an obvious example). The novel is painted with broad brushstrokes, and is full of old-fashioned pathos. It also (and this too is an essential ingredient for classic success) has a compelling aura of mystery. Mole's tunnels, Ratty's burrow, Badger's home, the labyrinth that leads under the Wild Wood to the cellars of Toad Hall (over traces of an older and abandoned human habitation) - all these mean the story feels in touch with something ancient and mysterious. It is strange without being too threatening; it refers more obviously to eternal verities than to sinister undercurrents.

In the end, of course, such forces of darkness as are allowed into the book are vanquished - apparently. Toad and his crew defeat the stoats and weasels, evict them from Toad Hall, and re-establish the status quo. The original readers, those conservative children, obviously liked it that way. Modern readers are likely to find things a little more problematic. Kenneth Grahame was a backward-glancing, golden age-haunting person, but even he knew the date of publication was a silent reproach to aspects of his book. Six years after publication, the first world war broke out, and Toad's world was never the same again.

This helps to explain some of the melancholy that shrouds the action. But there's something else as well. The character of Toad is, in many respects, modelled on Grahame's unhappy son Alistair, who committed suicide in 1920, while an undergraduate at Oxford. The fact that he chose to kill himself by lying on railway lines is especially poignant, considering the part that railways play in his father's story. The book as a whole is engrossed by retrospections, two of them being the spectres of disappointment and punishment.

When I began writing my pieces for Tuckett, I wanted to catch this sense of lurking elegy. Tuckett had been thinking along similar lines. Under his direction, the ballet opens in an attic, with the elderly Grahame/narrator (played by Anthony Dowell), surrounded by assorted cupboards, tallboys, and so on. Then the characters of The Wind in the Willows emerge from the furniture around him - Ratty preceded by Mole, thrillingly shaking out a river of blue silk - and as the action unfolds, Grahame remains on stage, at once controlling and controlled by his creation. The pathos of his position hardly needs to be spelled out.

So I didn't spell it out. Although I've allowed Grahame a necessary wistfulness, I've also respected the book's other moods, writing 20-odd poems that range from light comedy through broad farce to excitement to thoughtfulness and on to pastoral. The verse forms are appropriate to their situation: there are drinking songs, jaunty rhymes, hammering couplets, passages of reflective blank verse, and airy lyrics. They're meant to stand apart from the action and yet be a part of it.

I decided the pantheism would be impossible for a modern audience to digest if it were served up whole, so I diffused it into a general but acute season-consciousness and country-consciousness. The fight was more difficult. There's no denying its snobbery - and worse. But the longer I thought about it, the more strongly I felt it would be a mistake to think of it simply in terms of a class war. It was anarchy that really frightened Grahame; Toad's own chaos is as frowned-upon as that of the stoats and weasels. The Wind in the Willows is not a hectoring book, but it does contain a number of "messages". One of them is: everyone has to grow up, whether they like it or not. That's why children find it interesting, as well as simply enjoyable. Adults, too.

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This article appeared on p20 of the Guardian review section of the Guardian
on Friday 6 December 2002.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 19.03 EST on Friday 6 December 2002.
It was last modified at 19.03 EST on Tuesday 25 February 2003.
It was first published at 19.03 EST on Tuesday 25 February 2003.